October 24, 2017 –GE unveiled expansions to its suite of edge-to-cloud technologies and industrial applications, designed to help its customers build a complete asset strategy. These additions to the GE Digital portfolio complement the key software applications that drive industrial productivity and extend these benefits through Predix, the application development platform for the Industrial Internet.

To help industrial companies get the most out of their industrial assets and drive better business outcomes, GE Digital introduced: Predix Edge technologies to accelerate computing at the edge; the Predix platform combined with Microsoft Azure, the cloud for enterprises; Operations Performance Management software to bridge productivity from assets to operations; Field Service Management solutions designed to improve the customer experience; and platform tools designed to simplify industrial app development.

By 2022, Gartner predicts that 75 percent of enterprise data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud. The ability to compute and manage this information both at the edge and in the cloud are essential for industrial companies to truly optimize their operations.

To help customers accelerate their edge strategies and make any asset an intelligent asset, GE Digital is expanding its Predix Edge capabilities to help run analytics as close to the source of data as possible. Predix Edge gives customers with limited connectivity, latency limitations, regulatory or other constraints a way to deploy applications closer to the originating data – or at the edge. Enhancements include:

Predix Edge Manager allows customers to support large fleets of edge devices – up to 200,000 connected devices from a single console.

Predix Machine enables microservice-based applications to run at the edge on customers’ virtualized data center infrastructure or on server-class hardware from GE or its partners. This also supports Predix Edge Manager, which was previously available only as a cloud service.

Predix complex event processing (CEP) allows for analytics and other event processing at low latency, available at the edge in Q1 2018.

These edge solutions are intended to help companies move from intelligent asset management to automation to insights-led machine learning across a distributed system. One example is EdgeLINC, a comprehensive edge-to-cloud solution from GE Transportation integrated with Predix Edge Manager, Predix Machine and Asset Performance Management applications. EdgeLINC enables efficient device management, configuration and streaming analytics even when machines, such as rail assets, are constantly moving in and out of communication.

GE Digital and Microsoft are bringing together the advanced industrial platform services of Predix with the flexible, enterprise-proven services of Microsoft Azure. Available in North America starting Q4 2017 and expanding globally in 2018, this partnership extends the accessibility of Predix to Microsoft’s global cloud footprint, including data sovereignty, hybrid capabilities and advanced developer and data services, enabling customers around the world to capture intelligence from their industrial assets.

The partnership helps businesses better connect their information technology (IT) systems with their operational technology (OT) by bringing a company’s systems – and data – together in a shared environment. While IT and OT have traditionally existed in silos, Microsoft and GE are working to bridge this gap.

Understanding how an asset operates and its maintenance needs is critical to mitigating risk and improving productivity. Alongside its Asset Performance Management (APM) software, the core application deriving value from industrial assets, GE Digital introduced a complementary application that improves the operational performance of assets – like pumps, valves and heat exchangers – and drives a comprehensive asset management strategy.

This Operations Performance Management (OPM) solution helps industrials increase revenue and margins, optimize the throughput of industrial processes and make their sites more profitable. OPM uses real-time and historical data – along with advanced analytics – to help customers make better operational decisions. The solution provides an early warning if industrial processes deviate from plan, arms operators with the information and time to troubleshoot operational issues and helps them take preventative actions to meet business goals.

GE Digital’s OPM software initially targets the mining industry and will expand to additional industries early next year.

GE Digital also introduced Predix Studio to help companies build and scale their own industrial applications and extend its Asset Performance Management (APM) suite, Available in Q1 2018, Predix Studio simplifies the development process by giving customers the ability to extend applications and empower industrial subject matters experts – or citizen developers – to build apps in a low-code, high-productivity environment. A vital demographic, citizen developers comprise controls and reliability engineers, OT operators and line of business users with domain expertise but little or no coding experience. Using a mix of AI and machine learning, Predix Studio automates the heavy lifting of creating Industrial IoT apps